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Lake Minchumina — “Dear me,” I said to the puppies.

I was scanning the lake before me, noting how much harder the wind was hitting the drifts here than at our relatively-sheltered home a half-mile behind us. From here at the edge of our hill, I could barely make out the far shore, across a mile and a half of open mud flats and ice-covered lake. Although a clear sky glowed above, a 20-knot wind carried spindrift past us, creating a gauzy veil of snow 15 feet high.

The pups weren’t listening to me. The Islanders, we called them. Fiji, Jarvis and Tokelau didn’t mind the wind; they had scampered on across the creek and beyond.

I hadn’t planned on checking the net set under the bluffs on the north side of the lake today, intending instead to go the other direction, to the Post Office, to meet the Tuesday mail plane. I was expecting a load of dog food in addition to a week’s worth of mail. But it was past 1 p.m. when I heard news of the wayward plane. “One pilot’s in a meeting,” I was told. “And the other one is out flying. It might be past

5 p.m. when they land here, if they come today at all.”

That meant mail wouldn’t be sorted until Wednesday. That was the day I’d planned on making the 30-mile round trip to the first trapline cabin with a load of frozen fish. Then I wanted to check the fish net on Thursday.

I didn’t want to put off both jobs for a day, especially when a warm front had brought temperatures up above zero. But by the time I found out about the mail plane, I decided how to reorganize my next three days to make up for someone else’s lack of organization, and gathered my tools, fish picks, rubber gloves and a change of gloves, it was past 2:30 p.m.

The brilliant December sun had already slipped below the horizon by the time I cleared the hill. With two more hours of good daylight left, I would not have worried except for that wind.

I didn’t mind walking home after dark, but I did not want to do it through a whiteout that could easily obliterate the silhouette of the hill. I also did not want to expose the pups to too much wind. Some blustery conditions would boost their confidence, while too much would destroy it.

“Let’s start,” I informed the little tails disappearing into the spindrift. “If it gets bad we’ll just go home.” At least the north shore where the net was would be sheltered.

The Islanders didn’t care. While wind and airborne silt and snow buffeted me gently as I walked, the pups seemed oblivious. Tokelau and Fiji took the lead, with chunkier dark-eyed Jarvis always heading off to pursue his own plans. A willow wand marking the spot where I’d leave the river trembled in the wind, a red ribbon fluttering horizontally from the top, a bright splash of color against the white and blue and gray and black of the mud flats, the lake, the hill, the distance mountains, and the sky.

Soft shin-deep drifts alternated with dark, glassy ice. Here and there swamp gas bubbles showed white under the frozen surface, some stretching to 6- and 8-feet across but all showing the opaqueness that meant the gas was frozen within the ice, eliminating the water pressure that would force gas out if I was to poke a hole into it.

Lines of snow frozen onto the dark surface marked the trail of my dog team from five days ago. Although it disappeared under most of the drifts, the pups and I managed to follow the scratches. Whenever the Islanders began pawing at their faces, I called them back to me, rubbing snow from their eyes. At first they resented the handling, but they quickly figured out what I was doing. Soon the pups were rubbing against me instead of the other way around.

They were half-grown adolescents, really, pushing 60 pounds at 5 months old. Their father Jiles led Julie’s team most of the time, a focused and thinking leader with a cute face mirrored in Jarvis’s, with the same bright eyes and ear tips that still lopped over. In another couple months they’d be making this run hooked in a dog team.

Having been to the net before, the pups scampered ahead as we drew near, the wind abating as we moved below the bluffs. Sheets of airborne snow still blurred the hill behind us, but not as much as before. Still, I wasted no time, quickly shoveling snow from the holes at each end of the net, chipping an inch of ice away from the center and working to the edges where it thickened to 6 inches.

A low noise caught my attention, not loud, but an almost continuous b-b-brroom m-m-m, ba-ba-br-r-ooomm-b. The musical tones of the restless lake ice told me something was out of balance. Perhaps the wind was causing the snow-free ice to thicken rapidly enough to put the water below under pressure, causing frequent cracking, or an atmospheric pressure change set things off kilter. The penetrating sound made it seem like the ice was about to break up beneath me, had it not been for the deep tones singing of a surface 2 feet thick.

I’ve had some pups grab the net and pull along with me, but Jarvis grabbed the netting and pulled against me as I hauled the 60-yard net from the black depths. Whitefish, suckers and the occasional pike splashed out, and soon the pups were licking up eggs spilled from the gravid whitefish. Fiji began gnawing the fins off one fish as I pulled the netting from each with my fish pick, tossing them out of the way as I worked.

Although mostly sheltered here, the occasional gust slapped at me, sometimes from the true northeast direction but just as often squirreling in from the west or south. A “snow devil” of airborne powder formed a few feet away, a mini-tornado 8 feet across and 15 feet high.

The light blue of the sky darkened, imperceptibly at first. Then, south of Denali, past Mount Foraker, past the pyramidal needle point of Mount Russell, past the distant smaller peaks whose names I did not know, and just above where the Alaska Range curved south out of sight, the evening star appeared. Even in the lingering light, it shone as brightly as the landing light of an airplane on a two-mile final to landing.

Tokelau made himself a nice nest in the sled. Fiji was halfway through his whitefish and I hoped he didn’t pick up tapeworms from it. Jarvis came and sat beside me, pressing his furry body against mine in a way that told he he was getting tired and a little cold, and for a moment I paused in my work to hug him close, feeling the puppyness stilI beneath his shaggy coat.

By 5 p.m.the net was back in place, gloves and pick tools and 27 fish safely stowed in the sled. The radiant orange horizon in the southwest was fading to a dusky glow but the haziness of blowing snow had abated. Not only had the wind had dropped a bit, but also the inch of new snow had been redistributed, packed into deeper, denser drifts.

Even in the dusky light we could stilI see the trail, the pups and I, and with the contentment that comes with a job finished, we turned our backs to the wind and headed into the beautiful deepening evening for home.

Miki Collins is a trapper who lives in Lake Minchumina.